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The Women of Robert Stone's “Helping”

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The Women of Robert Stone's “Helping” Embodying Conflicted Faith and Questionable Grace: The Women of Robert Stone’s “Helping” and “Miserere” Christine Grogan Pennsylvania State University I see this enormous empty space from which God has absented himself,” states Robert Stone, who died in January 2015 (qtd. in “Weber). He goes on to add, “I see this enormous mystery that I can’t penetrate, a mystery before which I’m silent and uncompre - hending” (qtd. in Weber). At the end of his short story “Miserere,” Stone presents his readers with a haunting image of “this enormous mystery”: after blessing and burying aborted fetuses, the Catholic convert Mary Urquhart stands before the altar of St. Macarius ques - tioning what it means to be created in God’s image. Offering the Divine “[i]ts due” (24), she whispers words from the prayer Miserere mei, Deus , the title of Psalm 51, one of the seven Penitential Psalms, well known to believing Catholics. Stone tells the reader that she is torn between adoration and disgust. Stone is not known for his female characters. Even the last book he published before he died, Death of the Black-Haired Girl (2013), the title of which suggests that its focus is on a woman, is really about the professor with whom the woman has an affair. Partly answering his own question of why women do not read Stone to the extent that men do, Patrick Smith states, “Stone’s women are never quite the subject; they never quite embody what is at issue” (33), and for most of his L&B 37.1 2017 26 / Literature and Belief novels and short stories, this assertion rings true. A quick reading of his first collection of short fiction, Bear and His Daughter (1997), re - veals that many of his female characters lie on the stories’ peripheries, functioning solely to complicate their males’ struggles. For example, in the earliest of Stone’s published short stories, “Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta,” the expatriated, plague-ridden Marge cheats on her husband, Fletch, with his friend, Fencer. Likewise, the reader encoun - ters the helpless, middle-aged, and elderly women who call Kieran and Mackay to action to devastating effects in “Absence of Mercy.” In the story “Under the Pitons,” “bimbo” Gillian, with an “irritating accent,” is left to drown to death by her boyfriend, Blessington (124). Some of Stone’s females do, however, take center stage, such as the pill-popping, “deluded” (170), former topless dancer Alison in “Aquarius Obscured,” but what the reader learns about her under - mines her credibility—she is having a conversation with a dolphin she thinks has plans to overtake the world, and at the story’s end she turns out to be something of a thief. If one had read just those four stories, one might be inclined to think that Stone stereotypes his female characters as utterly flawed beings who are to be mis - trusted and do not deserve to be granted full humanity. If such were the case, one might be discouraged from reading more of his work. Yet Gregory Stephenson calls attention to some female characters in Stone’s short stories who cling to their religion in a merciless world. Stephenson praises these women for their strong religious con - victions. Specifically, he compliments Grace Elliot from “Helping” and Mary Urquhart from “Miserere” for their commitment to their Catholic faith. According to Stephenson, these women are devoted to “active compassion and to the service of the supernatural princi - ples” (218). Moreover, they “seek to counter the disorder of the world” (219), and they embody the true Church, “the Christian spirit of sacrifice and charity” (221). Stephenson even sees Mary as a Job-like character, a victim who suffers from unfortunate circum - stances, as a miscalculated frozen ice-skating pond claimed the lives of her loved ones. What his analysis fails to mention, however, is that Grace, although mostly true to her name, essentially helps her alcoholic husband to keep drinking, and Mary, who does perform Grogan: The Women of Robert Stone’s “Helping” and “Miserere” / 27 selfless acts, is somewhat responsible for her family members’ deaths and is most likely grieving over her loss by having affairs with priests. Thus, Stephenson’s reading also borders on presenting these female characters as stereotypes—albeit as better women than they really are. In an attempt to shed more light on Smith’s question, one not yet properly answered by literary critics, and to engage with Stephenson’s insightful commentary, revisiting the stories “Helping” and “Miserere” from Stone’s 1997 collection may prove helpful. Dedicated to his wife, Janice, the collection casts female characters who are complex and ambivalent, emerging as stronger than their male counterparts in Stone’s hypermasculine landscape where drinking, drugging, and fighting abound. These developed female characters edge beyond the margins and refuse to play the victims they initially seem as - signed, simultaneously functioning as forces of destruction as well as bearers of grace, and, in so doing, embodying, despite what Smith argues, a significant issue—their author’s ambivalent moral outlook. I. Stone cultivated his craft for almost a half-century, publishing eight novels, two collections of short stories, two screenplays, and a memoir and spawning two films. 1 With his series of accomplished 1Along the way he also garnered many literary awards. The book that launched his career, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), won the Faulkner Foundation Award for Notable First Novel of the year and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Dog Soldiers (1974), his second novel and the work for which he is best known, won the National Book Award and was made into the film Who’ll Stop the Rain? His third novel, A Flag for Sunrise (1981), enjoyed the reputation of being the only book published in 1981 that was nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won the PEN Faulkner Prize and the Los Angeles Times Award for best novel of the year. His fifth and sixth novels, Outerbridge Reach (1992) and Damascus Gate (1998), were both finalists for the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter was a Pulitzer finalist. 28 / Literature and Belief novels and potent short fiction, Stone fought his way to becoming one of the foremost of modern writers. Mark Bautz, for example, con - siders him “one of contemporary fiction’s big talents” (33). Similarly, Smith, who notes that Stone has always been respectfully yet superfi - cially reviewed, states, “Nobody of Stone’s generation comes near him—not in the elegant clarity of his sentences and not in terms of the thematic whale he has pursued from one book to another” (30). Yet Stone has neither been widely read nor achieved the recognition from literary critics that his work merits. To date, only two mono - graphs on him, by Stephenson and Robert Solotaroff, have appeared along with a handful of scholarly articles, and Dog Soldiers has earned him a spot in studies of Vietnam War literature. Most critical response, however, appeared before the publication of Bear and His Daughter , which, aside from Stephenson’s commentary, has re - ceived almost no critical attention, and even less has been written about Stone’s female characters. More, although not much, has been written about Stone’s religious ambivalence. Claiming that Stone’s “characters have always been tor - mented by a religious itch,” Robert Fredrickson refutes the argument that his protagonists are postmodern and maintains, instead, that his work seemingly clings to a “search for an elusive God,” characteristic of the modernist writer (“Robert Stone’s Opium” 45, 49). Stone writes in the realist tradition and explores man’s possible connec - tion with a higher being. Ken Lopez and Bev Chaney argue that he is “widely considered to be the American novelist who has most thoroughly picked up the strand of modern literature that begins with Joseph Conrad, in which the moral fiber at the core of man is tested under stress” (123). With characteristically modern ambiva - lence, he revisits the theme of man spiritually struggling and seeking to actualize himself in a complexly flawed world where humans are more disposed to violence than to love. Like Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1902), Stone’s protagonists question whether life is merely a “mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose” (Lopez and Chaney 71). In his review of Bear and His Daughter , Leon Lewis notes that Stone’s “often grim but hardly solemn vision of ‘American reality’ Grogan: The Women of Robert Stone’s “Helping” and “Miserere” / 29 has been based on characters (usually male) who are essentially alone, often angry or rootless, tempted or touched by violence, and inclined [to] or deeply involved with alcohol and/or drugs.” The cast of characters in his plot-heavy stories includes “drug smugglers, gun runners, alcoholics, drug addicts, schizophrenics, murderers, and sadistic law enforcers” who yet are surprisingly well read and well versed in classical music (Solotaroff x). Characters are probed to their existential core, and clear-cut answers are replaced with ques - tions about the absence of innate, positive, moral structures. Stone’s uncertain outlook is understandable in light of what has been documented about his life. As he says, “My early life was very strange” (qtd. in Weber). Abandoned by his father as an infant, Stone was reared by his schizophrenic mother, Gladys Grant. When he was six, his mother was institutionalized, and he was placed in a Roman Catholic orphanage, St. Ann’s, run by the Marist Brothers, where he remained until he was ten years old, an experience he fictionalizes in “Absence of Mercy.” A member of a West Side gang in New York, he was thrown out of high school, joined the Merchant Marine, and is said to have become an atheist at the age of seventeen (Solotaroff 5).
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